Where Does Civic Nationalism Come From?

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Propositionality

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To those of you who have joined us recently, one of the most important things we do here at the Imperium Press Substack is to give you the tools to defeat your enemies. In this case, conceptual tools. These tools are a potent solvent that will dissolve liberalism. Some, like imperative ethics, are a bit technical. But the tool we’re going to introduce today is both powerful and highly intuitive. You can talk about it with your boomer Dad, if you’re fortunate enough to have a boomer Dad that doesn’t like civic nationalism. This tool is called propositionality.

Propositionality is a very simple idea. Once you see it, you will see it everywhere. And once you see its implications, it will be no mystery why our world is becoming a left-wing hellhole.

Propositionality is when propositions exhaust a given domain. In plain language, something is propositional when it’s a matter of belief. Isn’t everything a matter of belief though? The fact that we might think so, is part of the problem. It shows how deep the rot really is.

Some things are not a matter of belief. First, let’s stop to think what a belief actually is. A belief is a proposition that can be true or false. Taste is an example of something that isn’t propositional. When you like the flavour of strawberries, you’re not affirming the truth of the flavour of strawberries—that doesn’t make sense because a flavour isn’t a proposition. An example of something that is propositional would be a scientific theory. Geocentrism, the proposition that the sun rotates around the earth, may be false, but it’s at least not a category error to affirm it as true—you’re just mistaken.

All sorts of things can be propositional. Religion can be propositional—a Buddhist can say “I affirm the Four Noble Truths” and that makes him a Buddhist. Morality can be propositional—someone can say “it’s true that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and that makes him a “nice person”.

Nationality can also be propositional. The propositional nationalist is the person who says something like “anyone can be an American as long as he believes in freedom and equality before the law”. The person’s birth or history have nothing to do with his nationality—his nationality is a matter of what beliefs he holds. This kind of “nationalism” is more commonly called civic nationalism.

All these are examples of propositional identities. Propositional identities are totally fine—we all have them. But if your core identity is a proposition, that’s a huge problem. Propositionality has a number of deeply troubling implications. There are many of them, but let’s go through just three.

1) Universalism

Beliefs can’t produce any kind of core identity, for the simple reason that they’re truth-apt—they’re evaluated in terms of true vs. false. Truth is inherently universal. It makes no distinctions—not even between humans and animals. The sun rotates around the earth (or it doesn’t), no matter who you are. No matter whether you’re a man or a cockroach.

Since truth is the same for you as it is for an Eskimo or a Zuni tribesman, it can’t be used to distinguish along ethnic lines. Again, this is not a problem when it comes to something like geocentrism, because “geocentrist” is not your core identity. But it is a huge problem when your core identity is propositional. If you’re a Buddhist, and Buddhism is what matters above all else, then you have no cause to object to your neighbour being a Buddhist, whether or not he’s an Eskimo.

If your core identity is a belief, then the core fact about you is something that can be readily adopted by anyone. This makes people into a kind of empty vessel just waiting to be filled with beliefs. You probably know this as magic dirt theory, where by some magical operation, just believing the right things changes your essential nature. If our core identity is a belief, then being replaced by other peoples is, as long as they hold that belief, simply being replaced by ourselves.

2) Open Borders

When we say that our core identity is a belief, this is another way of saying that we exist only epistemically. For someone to question the belief is for them to question your core identity, your very existence. Liberals are the ultimate propositional identitarians. This is why when you challenge them about their gender confusion or whatever other nonsense they believe, they say “you’re questioning my right to exist”.

Beliefs are not geographically bound, they spread virally, and this includes illiberal beliefs. This makes the liberal extremely insecure and constantly worried about “fascists” under the bed. As long as there is just one person in the world who “questions his right to exist”, he can’t sleep at night. Therefore he must leave no stone unturned in rooting out everything other than himself globally. Borders are a problem for civic nationalism. They don’t make sense.

Civic nationalism is just a kind of liberalism. If you asked Americans, Brits, Germans, and South Koreans who are civic nationalists what makes someone an American, Brit, German, or South Korean, they would probably say something like “believing in freedom and equality before the law”. In other words, they would just list a number of liberal beliefs. But then, there’s no effective difference between any of these countries. What is it? Food? Dress? You don’t need borders to eat kimchi or wear a dirndl. So borders don’t make sense under civic nationalism because all the things that supposedly make a country what it is aren’t geographically or ethnically bound. Civic nationalism—AKA propositional nationalism—is just a halfway house to globalism.

3) Progressivism:

Propositional identities are based on beliefs, and these sorts of beliefs aim at knowledge. The thing about bodies of knowledge is that they get closer to the truth over time. There is no substantive body of knowledge about which we know less now than we did 50 years ago, still more 100 years ago, still more 1,000 years ago, and so on. Another way of putting this is that knowledge is cumulative.

This is pretty obvious when it comes to something like science. If you could transport a Neolithic surgeon to the present, you wouldn’t dare let him operate on you with that rock in his hand. Science is a body of knowledge and knowledge gets better over time. But the sorts of beliefs in propositional identities are also aiming at knowledge. Morality is supposedly a kind of knowledge.¹ Buddhism is also a kind of knowledge, since its core is a set of truth-apt propositions—the Four Noble Truths.

The problem for propositional identities is that a) they’re bodies of knowledge, and b) bodies of knowledge get closer to truth over time. Knowledge is supersessionist—new knowledge beats old knowledge. Another way of putting this is that knowledge is progressive. So if morality is just a set of propositions, it makes no sense to believe in an old morality because it would be a world-historical first if knowledge actually went backwards over thousands of years. Same with religion. Believing in anything less than the newest development of your religion (or really, just the newest religion) would be idiotic if religion were at bottom a set of propositions.

If our core identity is going to be propositional, liberals really just have got it all right. They are ahead of everyone else on this. The current thing is the best thing. Their logic is unassailable—if and only if our core identity is a propositional one. Look around though. Does liberalism seem to have it all right? If not, it’s time to rethink propositional identity.

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Most people intuitively grasp propositionality, but they know it as ideology. This is just one aspect, this is propositionality in politics. Propositionality extends to other domains such as religion, morality, and nationality, and it’s equally ugly there. It’s one thing to say “I’m Han Chinese and therefore Buddhist”. But you can’t say “I’m Buddhist first” because you weren’t born a Buddhist, and to freely choose what you are is to be a liberal. To choose your identity is to decide as an individual what you are, and in doing this you would be really no different than a trans “woman”. Propositionality is not all bad, only when our core identities are propositional.

So, can we be rid of core propositional identities? Yes, because pre-propositional identities, or in other words folkish identities, are available to us, right now. They never disappeared, they were never superseded. You can still be an ethnic Briton, you can still follow the ways of your ancestors. Propositionality didn’t replace folkish identities, it built on top of them. And this is the proper order—with the deeper folkish identities at the foundation, and the propositional identities as derivative of those. The folkish turn means going back to the root; modernity means mistaking the root for the branch.

1. It’s really not. We explain this in the aptly titled article Morality is Not a Kind of Knowledge.